Into the Weird: The Collected Stories of James Palmer

by James Palmer

  I told Mr. Cowart this, and he merely shrugged, said I was welcome to whatever remnants I could find, and left me to poke through the dirt while he went off to attend to his farming chores. Retrieving sample containers, I set about gathering what shards of meteorite I could, being careful to cause no further damage. I had never heard of one being so fragile, especially after remaining intact both on entry into Earth’s atmosphere and impact. I was especially intrigued upon examining some of the pieces and finding a hollow indentation on one side of several pieces, not unlike the porous cavities one finds in certain types of volcanic rock. I was also curious as to why I could find no piece bigger than a potsherd, and I wondered what meteor remains were concealed under Mr. Cowart’s field.

  I took what I could and returned to the University to analyze the fragments. The meteor is–was–a rather unremarkable specimen of carbonaceous chondrite, with a few traces of nickel-iron. The only thing unique about it was that it also contained small trace amounts of some organic compounds, a startling find, to be sure, but perhaps not all that unusual. We’ll know more when more meteorite debris has been recovered and studied thoroughly. In the meantime, I consider this incident concluded.

  I filed the letter away and went to work at the hardware store, stringing for the paper when they needed me. John Cowart took his newfound fame in stride, going back to work on his farm like nothing had happened. After a couple of weeks, the townspeople forgot about it. Were it not for my article, tacked to a roof beam in my attic bedroom, I would probably have forgotten about it too. But things transpired later that I can never forget, no matter how hard I try.

  After the meteor strike, no one saw much of the Cowarts. John and his eldest boy Owen were usually weekly fixtures at the hardware store, but they had not been in. Once a week like clockwork I could hear the grumbling of John Cowart’s old truck as it rumbled into town, where the whole Cowart clan would pile out to get supplies, Mrs. Cowart heading to the grocery with her youngest in tow, and John and Owen coming to the hardware store to order seed or get other things necessary for the maintenance of their farm. My father, who had come to rely on the large purchases they usually made, had become most agitated, and he strutted and fretted about the store nervously, and yelled at me more than usual. When the Cowarts finally did rumble into town, it was like the circus had arrived. Everyone’s heads snapping toward the sound, and peaking out of shop windows.

  John and Owen came into the hardware store, and while Owen began wandering the aisles, John engaged my father in conversation.

  While I tried to listen in, Owen came up to the counter with a most unusual request.

  “How do I get books from the library?”

  I looked at him for a long moment. The Cowarts were not dumb, but they were not the kind of people who voluntarily spent their time in studious pursuits. I was frankly pleased that one of them was taking an interest in books.

  “Oh, you just go to the library and get a library card. Then you can borrow all the books you want?”

  “Oh.” Owen worked his jaw and glanced around at the displays surrounding the counter. “How much does one of them library cards cost?”

  “It’s free,” I answered.

  “How long can I keep ‘em? The books.”

  “Two weeks.”

  Owen nodded, digging in his pocket. He pulled out a few nickels and grabbed some licorice whips from a glass jar to my right. “For the young’uns,” he said before sidling off.

  John Cowart bought a spool of copper wire, a spool of aluminum wire, and an almanac.

  My father came and leaned against the counter. “Strangest conversation I’ve ever had,” he said.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, he was asking me about all sorts of strange things. He wanted to know about the phases of the moon and electrical conductivity of different metals. I’ve never heard John Cowart talk like that.”

  “Owen bought some licorice whips and wanted to know how to check out books from the library.”

  “Huh,” my father said. We both stood there and watched as the Cowarts climbed back into their truck and left. We stood there looking out that window for a long time that morning.

  The Cowarts became more or less regular fixtures around town again, at least for a time. They’re weekly visits to town continued, and now included stops at the library, where several townspeople, myself included, witnessed each of the Cowart children hefting large stacks of books into and out of the library. Our library isn’t very large and, having spent a great deal of time there myself in their younger years, estimated that at this rate, they would read every book in the library inside of a month.

  But the family’s new love of reading wasn’t the only peculiarity that manifested itself. The Cowart’s had always been hale and hearty folk, coming from good, sturdy mountain stock, but now each appeared pale and thin. John Cowart’s ribs began to show beneath his shirt, his overalls appeared two or three sizes too large as they hung from his shoulders.

  The family also began to show a strange sensitivity to light. Both Mr. And Mrs. Cowart, and all the children, began wearing hats pulled down tightly over their eyes, and they occasionally stumbled, as if stymied by excessive glare. Next they started wearing long sleeved shirts to cover their arms, despite the heat. Their skin began to take on a ghostly white pallor, and the slightest exposure to the sun would cause them to blister quickly.

  I was not only curious but concerned. I had feelings for Mr. Cowart’s daughter Emmaline. Emmaline Cowart and I were the same age, and she was without doubt the prettiest girl in my graduating class. I saw her whenever I could socially, but for one reason or another had never gotten up the courage to ask Mr. Cowart’s permission to court her officially. I don’t that he would have objected, and socially it would have been an acceptable pairing, but my father disapproved of anything that took my mind off the business of running his hardware store, and I still dreamed of going away to New York to become a writer.

  For a while I imagined taking Emmaline with me. She could take a job as a secretary and I could start peddling manuscripts to the major magazines. But alas, this would not come to pass.

  One afternoon, I had taken my lunch on the small town square when the Cowarts’ old truck rumbled into town. They parked outside the grocery, and Mrs. Cowart, now covered head to toe in a heavy-looking dress and floor length skirt, white bonnet tied around her head, climbed out and ushered her equally covered children into the grocery. Spying Emmaline among them, I called to her. We met halfway between the edge of the edge of the square and the grocery.

  “Hello, Daniel,” she said demurely. She had never called me Danny, as everyone else did.

  Her head and body were equally covered, and the bill of her bonnet cast a shadow over her lovely face.

  “H-how have you been,” I stammered.

  “F-fine, fine. I guess.” Emmaline faltered, staring at the pavement.

  “What’s happening?” I said, finding my courage at last. “I-I’m sorry, Emmaline. I don’t mean to pry, but your family seems to be going through something.”

  The moment those words left my lips I wished I could have taken them back. But Emmaline simply nodded.

  “I don’t know what is happening, Daniel. I wish I did. I must look a fright.” She began self-consciously fiddling with her dress, the strings of her bonnet. “I’m dressed like my grandmother.” She managed a small, weak laugh.

  “What is happening to you all?” I asked.

  “I wish I knew. Ever since that meteor, things just haven’t been right. Daddy and my brothers have started losing their teeth, we’re all gettin’ sunburn from the least amount of light, even lamplight. Owen has been readin’ all those books and inventin’ queer stuff out in the barn, crazy machines that do the strangest things. And nothin’ tastes right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Emmaline shrugged. “Nothin’ we eat or drink tastes right. Not the food, not the water, nothin’. Mama even
got us some Co-Colas and some orange Ne-his the last time we were in town. Stuff tasted like dog sweat or somethin’.”

  “What are you eating?”

  Emmaline ran her hands along the hem of her skirt nervously, looking behind her to see if her mother or siblings had emerged from the grocery store. “Stuff from Daddy’s garden. At first we thought all the vegetables had some kind of disease or something. Everything came out all white and funny shaped, and smelled horrible. The dogs wouldn’t even touch it. About the time all the food started tastin’ bad, the stuff from the garden actually smelled good, so one day we tried it. Daniel, that was the best stuff we’d ever tasted, and we don’t even know what it is. After we ate it that first time, that’s when we all started changin’.”

  “So what does your mother buy at the grocery?”

  “Salt, sugar and baking soda,” Emmaline replied.

  I was going to inquire as to why these ingredients were needed so frequently when her mother appeared, carrying a large grocery sack no doubt laden with the items Emmaline mentioned.

  “I have to go now,” she said and, without another word, turned and rejoined her family near their truck.

  I still had so many questions, but Emmaline was leaving, and she had made it clear that there would be trouble for her if her family knew what she had just told me.

  Shortly thereafter, the Cowarts stopped coming into town at all. The grocery sent a boy out every couple of weeks with a crate full of their strange orders, and they had checked out and read every book from the town library concerning science, biology, and chemistry, subjects out of the normal kin of what a farming family like the Cowarts would be interested in. One day I asked the grocer’s boy, Hugh Willis, about his visits to the Cowart farm.

  “Oh, it’s a quiet place,” said Hugh. Nobody out and about. And most of their fields are done growed up, choked with a few weeds, but mostly this weird, wispy white stuff and these ugly, grayish white fruits, like gourds except uglier, and they stink to high heaven.”

  “The house is always dark, the curtains drawed up tight, like they ain’t nobody home. But I can hear ‘em movin’ and a shufflin’ around in there some. Sometimes I can feel their eyes starin’ at me as I walk up on the porch. I set my box down, pick up an envelope full of money, and hightail it out of there lickety split.”

  I thanked Hugh and handed him a quarter, which he proudly pocketed as he ran back to the grocery.

  I was worried. Worried for the Cowart family, and especially for Emmaline. Over and over I pondered all that had transpired, trying to make logical sense of it. One afternoon while sorting nails at my father’s store, it came to me. The strangeness started right after that meteor had struck the Cowart farm. The meteor had to be the key to unlocking this queer mystery. In my mind’s eye I could see the meteor as it lay in the soft loam of John Cowart’s freshly tilled earth. How old it must have been, and how many millions–perhaps billions–of miles must it have traveled to reach our tiny blue sphere and wind up in a farmer’s field. Where was the larger hunk of rock it had been a part of? And what were conditions like on that particular sphere?

  That’s when I had a thought that chilled by blood and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It was too terrible and fantastic to contemplate, and yet there it was. It would not go away.

  I thought about it the rest of that day, and all the next. Finally I set a plan in motion. On Sunday we went to church; the store was closed, and once service was over, I would have much of the day to myself. On Sunday I made up my mind to venture out to the Cowart farm to see what was going on and, if possible, help that poor family and its fair Emmaline escape whatever doom was descending on them.

  Using my key to enter the hardware store after church, I outfitted myself for my errand. Taking a small satchel with me, I took up a flashlight, a pocket knife, and a machete, and headed out in my father’s car to the Cowart farm.

  It was just as Hugh Willis had described it. Eerily quiet, the paths and gardens choked with strange, foul-smelling weeds. No bird chirped, no insect buzzed. The farm looked as if it had been long deserted. Even John Cowart’s truck looked as if it had fallen into disuse.

  The Cowart’s white farmhouse stood in the midst of it all, its windows shuttered, casting gloomy shadows on the transmogrified landscape.

  I had scarcely left the car when it attacked me. It came from under the porch, an inky black, chitinous thing, its toothless mouth filled with writhing tendrils that glistened with what I could only assume was some form of venom.

  I managed to dodge it’s assault, missing a touch from the tendrils by less than an inch, and got to my machete. I brought the blade down onto the thing’s head, cleaving it in two. The horror let out a strange piping sound before falling dead in a heap of too many legs, its black body glistening wetly in the sun.

  I backed away from this blasphemy slowly, hand over my mouth, trying to get my racing heart under control. My rational mind tried to make sense of what I had just witnessed. This was, I surmised, one of the Cowart’s loyal hounds, transformed somehow by that cursed meteor into the earthly canine’s extraterrestrial analog. What other horrors awaited me in the Cowart’s brooding farmhouse?

  I had to know, had to see this through, and strike yet more killing blows if need be.

  I expected another attack, as the Cowarts had at least two dogs who usually napped under the front porch during the heat of the day. But I made it to the front steps of the farmhouse unmolested.

  That’s when I noticed all around me a cloying stench, a stick miasma of foulness beyond description. It seemed to be given off by the very plants around me, twisted, strange things, stark white, with thick, bristling tendrils in place of leaves. Fungoid polyps sprouted obscenely from a few of them, some of them as large as turnips. These were, no doubt, the strange foodstuffs the Cowarts had been subsisting on that poor Emmaline told me about. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and tied it around my face, but I knew I wouldn’t survive this stench for long. I surmised that whatever it was, it was more than a foul aroma given off by the weird plant life, but the atmosphere these things needed to survive. Whatever the meteor had carried to Earth had brought with it a complete eco system. And it was spreading. The trees on the periphery of the Cowart’s property were beginning to wither, sicken and die, to be replaced by that blasphemous foliage. It writhed triumphantly, though no breeze blew to stir it.

  I focused my attentions again upon the Cowart house, vowing that this madness, whatever it was, must end now, before the entire countryside was overrun by this horrible alien jungle. I climbed the steps to the porch and banged on the door. There was no answer, but I could hear movement from inside, faint banging and scraping sounds, as if something heavy were being dragged upon the rough wooden floor.

  I turned the knob and found the door unlocked. Inside it was dark, the curtains being drawn against the daylight. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw something white moving in a far corner.

  “Help. Meeeee.”

  I walked toward the sound, and saw something I wish I could forget. There, crouched in the corner was a chalk white, misshapen thing that had once been John Cowart. Its long, thin tendril fingers were wrapped around a double-barreled shotgun it clutched at uselessly. At first I thought it was trying to protect itself from me, but I quickly understood that it was trying to bring the weapon to bear on itself. It’s skinny fingers fumbled with the heavy stock and trigger, and it stared at the gun as if trying to remember how it worked.

  The thing that had been John Cowart stared up at me, its jaundiced eyes beseeching me. I knew what it wanted. It was, after all, what I had come here to do, finding no other alternative. And yet I hesitated. “Where are the others?” I asked.

  It looked from me to the shotgun, then back up at me. And I knew what John Cowart had done in his final act of humanity. My eyes welled with tears at the thoughts of Emmaline...gone. But I mourned for this entire family. I mourned for what I had to do.
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br />   I had never fired a gun in my entire life, but I took it from what had once been John Cowart, loaded both chambers from a box of shells I found spilled on the floor in the hallway leading into the kitchen, and placed it against the soft flesh of the thing’s alien head. I closed my eyes as I pulled the trigger.

  Next I went to John Cowart’s barn. Inside I found an assemblage of what I surmised were young Owen’s many strange inventions. Tiny automatons and contraptions made of motors, belts and pulleys ripped from something else and put to some new, mysterious use. I found a large container of gasoline and started began pouring it about the place, starting with the barn and its collection of alien machinery. I poured it inside the house and around the foundation, I doused the corpse of what had once been the family’s loyal hound, and I emptied the can on the foul growths that had replaced their verdant garden.

  When the can was emptied I went to the Cowart’s truck and tractor, siphoning the gas out onto the ground with a length of hose I found. Then I lit a match and tossed it into the house, lighting another on my way to my father’s car and tossing it outside as I got in and sped away.

  The gasoline, combined with the dry, hot conditions, did its cruel work all too well, cleansing the land of this alien blight. The house and the alien foliage went quickly, leaving little trace, and the good men of the Mule Springs Volunteer Fire Department, summoned anonymously, were able to contain the blaze before it spread to the surrounding healthy woodlands. The fire was deemed an accident, and no one but me knew the horrible truth.

  The family’s remains were never found. I can only assume that whatever hideous form they took was more fragile to flame. I’ve never told anyone of these events, and this journal contains the only record of what actually happened the summer that meteor fell to earth.

  I look to the stars now not with wonder but with trepidation. For I know that even now a similar meteor is rocketing toward some distant planet–or perhaps even Earth–carrying with it the seeds of a hardy form of life evolved to propagate by taking over existing life. Perhaps all life on Earth is the result of an earlier meteor impact that brought with it the stuff of our makeup from some distant alien shore. If the code of life can be so easily usurped and rewritten, what hope to do we have of remaining the dominant form of life on this planet?